The Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian pointing, or Tiberian niqqud is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes of Tiberias to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to produce the Masoretic Text. The system soon became used to vocalize other Hebrew texts, as well. The Tiberian vocalization marks vowels and stress, makes fine distinctions of consonant quality and length, and serves as punctuation. While the Tiberian system was devised for Tiberian Hebrew, it has become the dominant system for vocalizing all forms of Hebrew and has long since eclipsed the Babylonian and Palestinian vocalization systems.
Consonant diacritics
The sin dot distinguishes between the two values of. A dagesh indicates a consonant is geminate or unspirantized, and a raphe indicates spirantization. The mappiq indicates that is consonantal, not silent, in syllable-coda position.
Vowel diacritics
The seven vowel qualities of Tiberian Hebrew are indicated straightforwardly by distinct diacritics: The diacritics qubutz and shuruq both represent, but shuruq is used when the text uses full spelling. Each of the vowel phonemes could be allophonically lengthened; occasionally, the length is marked with metheg. The ultrashort vowels are slightly more complicated. There were two graphemes corresponding to the vowel, attested by alternations in manuscripts like.. In addition, one of the graphemes could also be silent: Shva was used both to indicate lack of a vowel and as another symbol to represent the phoneme , the latter also represented by hataf patah. The phoneme had a number of allophones; had to be written with shva rather than hataf patah when it was not pronounced as. Before a laryngeal-pharyngeal, mobile šwa was pronounced as an ultrashort copy of the following vowel and as preceding,. Using ḥataf vowels was mandatory under gutturals but optional under other letters, and there was considerable variation among manuscripts. That is referenced specifically by medieval grammarians: The names of the vowel diacritics are iconic and show some variation:
